Hacktoberfest is an initiative by DigitalOcean and Github that is held every year in October to promote Open Source software development. To win a T-Shirt and some goodies, one had to submit four pull requests for any project on Github and get it merged. I contributed by adding 3 of my projects to this challenge as I wanted to help the people who were new to the open source world. These were:
- stlmp: Implementation of data structures and algorithms in C++, like the Standard Template Library (STL). I added this because I hoped the newer people who did not have any knowledge of how professional software projects work and were only familiar with implementing Algorithms and data structures. I also encouraged the contributors to write tests for the algorithms they write, so that they would gain some familiarity with software testing. I am using googletest for testing in the project.
- yoda: Personal assistant, based on the command line, implemented in Python. I had many ideas that I wanted to be implemented in this project but was not getting enough time to do so. I also hoped that I would get to learn from people who are more familiar with Python than me and I would get to learn from their code. The project turned out to attract many people, and many issues were resolved during this time.
- IdeaTrackerPlus: Android app - Idea tracking for the creative ones. I have several ideas for this project as well, but since I have been out of touch with development on the Android platform, I needed a lot of time actually to write code for this project. So, I added this to hacktoberfest and I got in touch with may people who are more familiar with Android than me, and many people contributed to the project as well.
It was a great experience, interacting with so many developers from all around the world, discussing ideas, reading their code, etc. I ended up contributing to my own project since I didn’t have much time to go to someone else’s project and start from scratch.
Overall, this was a great learning experience, and I am looking forward to next year, where I am hoping to host more projects than this year and contributing to some exciting projects as well.